Video On The Web: Nothing Matters But YouTube

YouTube has become more and more each month, the Facebook of online video. The Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) site’s inventory of content which can be used to support video advertising dwarfs that on the balance of the websites which offer free video. This is similar to Facebook’s absolute dominance of display advertising inventory.

Data about which video sites were visited on the web in September reported by Comscore showed once again that YouTube has promise as a highly profitable business. Wall St. estimates are the YouTube had $800 million of revenue last year. The figure rose to an estimated $1.1 billion this year and should reach $1.7 billion in 2012. It will be hard for any other online video site to make a great deal of money because none has YouTube’s scale

YouTube 161.4 million visitors last month. Its content generated 18.6 billion video views. Minutes per viewer were 378. Hulu, which has variously considered an IPO or sale of its operations, is a perfect example of the slight chances the balance of the industry has to build financial value. It has 27.1 million visitors and 642 million views. Minutes per viewer were only 180 for the month. Hulu may be able to sell a great deal of its video inventory, which it does not do now, and still would not be a large operations.

The situation is even more grim for the portal companies. As an example, Yahoo! video sites had 46.1 million unique visitors in September, 526.7 million videos view, and average minutes viewed of 49.4.